Movies are typically made by studios for mass distribution to audiences. The tools to generate media (e.g., camcorders, Web Cameras, etc.) have become progressively cheaper, the cost of production has gone down, and there has been an adoption of both tools and production by a mass audience. While such tools come with instructions on how to operate the tool, lessons on what kind of content to create have not been forthcoming.
There has been a proliferation in User Generated Content (UGC). Sites such as Youtube (when not showing commercial content created for mostly offline media or home movies) show that consumers have taken the cheaper tools to heart. UGC, however, is rarely compelling, and most often is amateurish.
There are existing media system and services which are currently employed by users to generate and manipulate entertainment content. For example, there are multi-player games and virtual worlds that are avatar-based, animated settings where users can interact with other animated characters in a spontaneous, non-scripted way. (See Second Life at www.secondlife.com). There are also websites that permit a user to generate an avatar based movie using a game engine. (See www.machinima.com). There are also tools that allow a user to record, edit, post and share media, allowing them to be creators and distributors. There are also video assemblers and sequencers that provide a drag and drop way for users to create their own sequences of previously recorded material such as ways to synchronize their own photos and video to music to create more compelling presentations of their personal media. There are also systems that permit mashups wherein users can combine together found footage or user generated combinations of media (often in random combinations, or unified by theme or graphics, but not based upon scripts.) There are also community stories (Wiki stories) that are stories written by multiple participants with text-based co-creative effort. There are also web based solutions for generating simple animated scenarios wherein users choose settings, time, characters, dialog and/or music. Finally, there are “Cinema 2.0” efforts that are more sophisticated efforts at crowd sourced script generation and video coverage in order to assemble a linear movie-type experience online that allow users to bypass high budget productions.
However, these existing systems and services do not provide a language and platform that will allow users to generate content that can be combined with a plurality of other users' content (within a social network) so that the users appear to be in the same scene together. It is desirable for users to see themselves in the story (thus earning their “15 MB of Fame”). Along with their remote peers, users want to interact with a plurality of other users of a social network, to create nonlinear narratives. None of the existing systems and methods provide the proper data, technology and social network that enables an easy-to-use user-generated interactive cinema system and it is to this end that the present invention is directed.